The obvious problem here is that you're a social recluse and have not been increasing the number and quality of your relationships to keep pace with the number of people who want to sell you stuff. If you had, the percentage of your email that is spam would have remained the same or perhaps even decreased.
Spamming appears to be carried out heavily by a small number of people. So it is not the "number of people who want to sell you stuff," it is whether you've happened to land on the mailing list of a heavy-duty spammer. It is quite obvious when this happens--your spam goes overnight from 2 or three per day to two or three dozen.
Ultimately, they'll have to pick and choose, just as they do with drugs, excluding only "performance-enhancing" modifications.
Even then it will be difficult, because most mods will probably be alleles already present in some people. So if you have an allele that, say, increases red cell production, you might have to prove that you came by it "naturally."
Why would you spam this guy? You'd be doing the same thing that they have been doing to you. Not to be too idealistic, but you wouldn't be much better than them.
Why should we need to spam him? Just post his address everywhere that spammers collect addresses (here is a good start). His own clients will spam him!
How come theories such as parallel universes, multiple dimesions, strings, etc in Physics are considered acceptable yet when someone suggests the possibility of extraterrestrials visiting the earth they are considered lunatics? We are willing to handwave aways so many instances of groups of people observing UFOs as weather balloons, swamp gas, ball lightnings or mass hallucinations. To me those physics theories seem more bizzare and unlikely than the possibility that with a zillion starsystems that there be many other beings far more advanced than us.
Actually, the theory that there are other beings in the universe far more advanced than us is at least as well accepted as the theory of parallel universes. What is not accepted is the claim that they are visiting us. The problem is that this requires accepting a whole lot more assumptions, none of which seem particularly likely: (1) They know we are here. (2) They have a reason to visit us. (3) They have a way to visit us. (4) They have motivation for concealing their visits. As an explanation for lights in the sky, this clearly unlikely explanation has to compete with an alternative explanation, which is not based upon assumptions, but rather upon a known fact: There is a lot of stuff of earthly origin in the sky that is difficult to recognize.
A lot of the assumptions made in this particular article were clearly innacurate (anyone who has spent five minutes in an Electronic Boutique knows that the average age of a video game purchaser is less than 28
Now that's a pretty foolish argument. Do you really believe that EB sells most games? What about Walmart, Target, BestBuy? Not to mention online sources such as Amazon? EB is a mall vendor, and kids hang out in malls. Adults don't have time to hang out in malls. As an over-28 game buyer, I buy perhaps 5% of my games at EB. When they do go into EB, they don't spend a lot of time there--they go in, buy a game, and leave. And some of the kids at EB are there with a parent, who does the actual game buying. After all, few kids have the income to buy many $50 games.
It's a big deal BECAUSE there is no license. They're giving away unlicensed software. To students. Who might use it to make really great software. With unlicensed tools. They might make great software. Illegal software, because of those unlicensed tools. Software MS may take offense at.
It seems to me that a statement from a Microsoft representative authorizing you to use the software constitutes a "license."
Posessing a ROM for a cartridge you own, as a backup, is legal
I've heard this asserted many times, but has any court actually ruled this to be the case? To my knowledge, there is no law that specifically allows making copies for use on alternative hardware. There are certainly legal issues here: Is it legal to use such a copy, not as a backup, but to play the game on different hardware, or must it be kept solely for use on the original hardware in the event that the original version fails? Is it legal to make a backup for a game that is distributed on a medium that does not have a significant likelihood of failure?
Any outcome where the money I paid for a lifetime subscription does not get honored could be very unhealthy for SonicBlue principles, kharmicly speaking.
Unfortunately, SonicBlue is dead, and most likely your "lifetime subscription" is, too (bet you thought it was your lifetime, not theirs). Sadly, the most likely outcome is that ReplayTV owners will get stuck with a nearly useless piece of hardware (although hackers may figure out how to do something worthwhile with it). I had this happen to me with an earlier, excellent product called Videoguide, which had an on-screen program guide and controlled a VCR. Unfortunately, it got bought up by a competitor (the people behind the far inferior VCR+) who immediately discontinued the service.
It's possible that somebody else might be willing to pick up the service. But the likelihood that former "lifetime subscription" owners would not be willing to pay again is a big impediment.
Might be an opportunity for Tivo, though: "Send us your old ReplayTV, and we'll give you $50 off a new TiVo."
It is easy to understand the temptation. The later photo is clearly better composed, with the man holding the child more in the foreground. Unfortunately, it gives the misleading (based on the photo from a moment before) impression that the soldier is intentionally aiming his rifle at the child. I can easily imagine how the photographer managed to convince himself that the altered photo was "more true" than the real ones. Of course, what he should have done was send in the first picture, which is less dramatic but gives a more accurate impression of what is going on.
Any service necessarily imposes customer support costs proportional to the number of customers. And everybody who has lifetime service is a customer who cannot be sold service by the new company, reducing the value of the acquisition. It would be more profitable not to buy the rights from Replay at all, but simply reverse-engineer the service and sell it independently as a replacement for the service lost when Sonicblue goes under.
Yes, initially I was going to turn it off, but I was surprised at how good it was. It has definitely turned me on to a show or two. While I only occasionally watch the suggestions, most are at least things that I might watch. And it's a handy visual indicator of the amount of free space left on the HD.
Re:If Ars Technica is so concerned about usability
on
A Better Finder?
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The key issue is that a sheet of paper does not generate light, so the issue of glare from an excessive expansive of white does not occur. If it is too bright, you automatically and instantly adjust it by changing the angle to the light source. That sort of instantaneous real time conrol of brightness is not available with a monitor.
In general, a white background works best on a monitor, because a lot of what we do still eventually ends up on paper, and we want to be aware of how it will look. But for material that is intended to be read online, I find white on black easier to read.
IANAL, but I would think that any purchaser of the replay business unit would be responsible for honoring existing service contracts, including those lifetime subscriptions.
Well, those lifetime subscriptions are a substantial liability, not an asset, and an obstacle to another company picking up the business unit as is. I suspect that the best that Replay TV owners can hope for is that somebody else will offer a replacement subscription service--at additional cost.
Maybe I'm just of the mindset that if I want to record something, I will. I would rather not have the Tivo make an educated guess at my tastes.
I'm of the mindset that likes to have a choice. So if I want my TiVo to do this, I'll turn the feature on. If I don't want it to do it, I'll switch it off.
Right now if you get the bad news that you have cancer, they may deside the best option is to treat it with a radiation treatment. This involves using a high energy beam to bore a hole completley through you that should contain the offending cells.
Methods of using multiple beams at different angles to reduce the dose to healthy tissues go back to the 1960's. Perhaps with X-ray lasers, a holographic approach could be used to get the beam intensity to "cancel out" over healthy tissue. But I'm not sure how that relates to this discovery.
I doubt Apple will go to any x86 varient because that will turn them into a software company and kill their business, unless they think that they will be able to make up the loss of profits off of hardware by increased OS sales.
I'm skeptical too, but that argument doesn't hold water. It is not the case that software for one x86 based computer will necessarily run on another computer using the same processor. I could easily imagine Apple producing a computer that would run OSX and Windows, but OSX still wouldn't run on non-Apple hardware.
Actually, they sell hardware, mostly and bundle software. Yes, they make money licensing their software, but most of their profit comes from hardware sales.
I'd say they sell software and bundle hardware. I think there are a lot more people who buy Macs because they prefer Apple's operating system than because they prefer the PowerPC.
Alas, the most prestiguous journals (Science, Nature, Scientific American) print the most revolutionary discoveries. This is fraught with peril, at least in the field of Physics.
First, you're talking about very new results which no one has seen before. It is likely, upon further review, that new information will slowly shed more light upon such things. Such revisions will be unlikely to make the pages of said journals.
Keep in mind that I was not referring to the scientific papers published in Science, but rather to the news reporting in the front of the journal. Nature also has an excellent news section. However, the scientific papers published in these high-profile journals are often not particularly accessible to nonspecialists, because they are extremely brief due to space considerations, and assume substantial knowledge of the particular field.
One professor I know had second thoughts about publishing in Nature because all the articles in his field in that journal turned out to be wrong later.
Frankly, this sounds like sour grapes from somebody who was having trouble getting his work accepted. These journals receive a lot of submissions, and the editors try to choose what seems to them the most novel and of greatest general interest, which often seems capricious to the submitting scientist.
Of course, most scientific reports turn out to be wrong eventually, at least in some respect. That is the nature of science. That is the nature of science. But any given finding stands on its own, and benefits fromt the wide readership of a high-profile journal.
And my original point is that's not necessarily the case. We're not talking about infinite time here, so it's quite possible that such a allele just happens to have not arisen, but could be "designed". Just how that designing and geneic manipulation works is the big unknown.
Nevertheless, it is enough time for pretty much every simple change to have been explored. Remember, mammalian cardiovascular systems all work pretty similarly. So we aren't merely talking about the human population, but all of their mammalian evolutionary predecessors.
Why? Wouldn't increasing cardiovascular efficiency by say 10% be a small change that's a good thing? (Assuming no side effects, of course)
Absolutely. So much so that there would be strong selection in favor of it. So if there is any simple genetic change that increases cardiovascular efficiency with no side effects, that allele should already be widespread within the human population. If it is not, then most likely the "no side effects" assumption is violated.
Which is why I said we'd have to master DNA manipulation, including changing adult cells. Changes done to adults would be easily reversable by the same techniques that created the change. Changes to eggs/sperm/zygotes would be very difficult to undo, if we can't do adult DNA manipulation.
However, we are still a long way away from being able to modify adult cells with high efficiency in the body. Right now, we can't even do it consistently in tissue culture. So this technology is going to arrive in stages:
Stage 1: Modification of eggs/sperm/zygote. We could probably do this today, if we knew what we wanted to change. It doesn't have to be perfect, so long as you can tell which embryos have it right and discard the bad ones.
Stage 2: Modification of a subpopulation of randomly selected adult cells. This is close for some cell types, far away for others. Suitable in many cases for correcting "loss of function" genetic disorders. Hazards from incorrect integration of the transgene remain to be satisfactorily resolved.
Stage 3: Modification of all adult cells in a particular tissue--very hard, and probably far in the future as far as arbitrary tissues are concerned, although some specific cell types may become accessible in a nearer time frame.
Sounds great. Now I'll just need TiVo to upgrade their cable box control software, so that if one show I want to record is in conflict with another, or if I forget to tell it to record a show, it will automatically reschedule that show for recording at a time when the TiVo is free.
There's no benefit for humans to have 10 toes (the little toes are pretty useless). But we still have 10 because, by chance, 8-toed humans didn't appear among our ancestors.
So evolution is far from perfect, and it's not unreasonable to believe we could tweak ourselves better than evolution.
Actually changes in the number of digits occur pretty readily. So chances are, if 8 toes were better than 10, we'd have 8. That doesn't necessarily mean 10 is better than 8, though (although I don't believe that the little toe is useless). After all, it has to be some number. It is a pretty safe assumption that all of the simple changes have been tried, if not in humans then in our pre-human ancestors. Evolution is indeed far from perfect, but one thing that it does do very well is find a local optimum. Which is to say that any small/easy change decreases fitness (or at best is neutral). That means all of the single nucleotide changes, as well as changes in the levels of expression of genes. So to tweak ourselves better than evolution, we're going to have to make large changes. We might find a protein in some phylogenetically distant species that works better than one of ours, but trying to make small tweaks to our own equipment will almost certainly do more harm than good.
Lastly, a bad gene would be as reversable as a bad drug, if we've mastered DNA manipulation. Just replace the new, defective gene with the old one (this would require gene thereapy to be developed for adults)
It's not that simple. It's hard to introduce a gene into every cel in a tissuel, unless you do it in the germ line or zygote. Some gain-of-function modifications can be made without having to transfect every cell. 10% of your cells overexpressing a growth factor might well be enough to produce an alteration. But the same level of technology would not be adequate to reverse it, because you'd only replace the defective gene in 1% of the cells that have it. And of course, if the side effect is cancer (something we're already beginning to see with gene therapy), you'd be trying to remove the gene from a rapidly dividing cell population that is prone to evolve resistance to whatever gene inactivation method you try.
Of course it can do a better job. Just look at the front section of Science magazine for an example of responsible, generally accurate, scientific jounalism. But it is not easy to find people who both have a broad understanding of science and who can write. It requires a real reporter, in other words, not somebody whose primary skills lie in rearranging the words in press releases.
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Ultimately, they'll have to pick and choose, just as they do with drugs, excluding only "performance-enhancing" modifications.
Even then it will be difficult, because most mods will probably be alleles already present in some people. So if you have an allele that, say, increases red cell production, you might have to prove that you came by it "naturally."
I couldn't figure out how to drag my bookmarks from Camino to Safari. More info?
It seems to me that a statement from a Microsoft representative authorizing you to use the software constitutes a "license."
I've heard this asserted many times, but has any court actually ruled this to be the case? To my knowledge, there is no law that specifically allows making copies for use on alternative hardware. There are certainly legal issues here: Is it legal to use such a copy, not as a backup, but to play the game on different hardware, or must it be kept solely for use on the original hardware in the event that the original version fails? Is it legal to make a backup for a game that is distributed on a medium that does not have a significant likelihood of failure?
Unfortunately, SonicBlue is dead, and most likely your "lifetime subscription" is, too (bet you thought it was your lifetime, not theirs). Sadly, the most likely outcome is that ReplayTV owners will get stuck with a nearly useless piece of hardware (although hackers may figure out how to do something worthwhile with it). I had this happen to me with an earlier, excellent product called Videoguide, which had an on-screen program guide and controlled a VCR. Unfortunately, it got bought up by a competitor (the people behind the far inferior VCR+) who immediately discontinued the service.
It's possible that somebody else might be willing to pick up the service. But the likelihood that former "lifetime subscription" owners would not be willing to pay again is a big impediment.
Might be an opportunity for Tivo, though: "Send us your old ReplayTV, and we'll give you $50 off a new TiVo."
It is easy to understand the temptation. The later photo is clearly better composed, with the man holding the child more in the foreground. Unfortunately, it gives the misleading (based on the photo from a moment before) impression that the soldier is intentionally aiming his rifle at the child. I can easily imagine how the photographer managed to convince himself that the altered photo was "more true" than the real ones. Of course, what he should have done was send in the first picture, which is less dramatic but gives a more accurate impression of what is going on.
Any service necessarily imposes customer support costs proportional to the number of customers. And everybody who has lifetime service is a customer who cannot be sold service by the new company, reducing the value of the acquisition. It would be more profitable not to buy the rights from Replay at all, but simply reverse-engineer the service and sell it independently as a replacement for the service lost when Sonicblue goes under.
Yes, initially I was going to turn it off, but I was surprised at how good it was. It has definitely turned me on to a show or two. While I only occasionally watch the suggestions, most are at least things that I might watch. And it's a handy visual indicator of the amount of free space left on the HD.
The key issue is that a sheet of paper does not generate light, so the issue of glare from an excessive expansive of white does not occur. If it is too bright, you automatically and instantly adjust it by changing the angle to the light source. That sort of instantaneous real time conrol of brightness is not available with a monitor.
In general, a white background works best on a monitor, because a lot of what we do still eventually ends up on paper, and we want to be aware of how it will look. But for material that is intended to be read online, I find white on black easier to read.
Well, those lifetime subscriptions are a substantial liability, not an asset, and an obstacle to another company picking up the business unit as is. I suspect that the best that Replay TV owners can hope for is that somebody else will offer a replacement subscription service--at additional cost.
I'm of the mindset that likes to have a choice. So if I want my TiVo to do this, I'll turn the feature on. If I don't want it to do it, I'll switch it off.
Methods of using multiple beams at different angles to reduce the dose to healthy tissues go back to the 1960's. Perhaps with X-ray lasers, a holographic approach could be used to get the beam intensity to "cancel out" over healthy tissue. But I'm not sure how that relates to this discovery.
I'm skeptical too, but that argument doesn't hold water. It is not the case that software for one x86 based computer will necessarily run on another computer using the same processor. I could easily imagine Apple producing a computer that would run OSX and Windows, but OSX still wouldn't run on non-Apple hardware.
I'd say they sell software and bundle hardware. I think there are a lot more people who buy Macs because they prefer Apple's operating system than because they prefer the PowerPC.
Of course, most scientific reports turn out to be wrong eventually, at least in some respect. That is the nature of science. That is the nature of science. But any given finding stands on its own, and benefits fromt the wide readership of a high-profile journal.
Stage 1: Modification of eggs/sperm/zygote. We could probably do this today, if we knew what we wanted to change. It doesn't have to be perfect, so long as you can tell which embryos have it right and discard the bad ones.
Stage 2: Modification of a subpopulation of randomly selected adult cells. This is close for some cell types, far away for others. Suitable in many cases for correcting "loss of function" genetic disorders. Hazards from incorrect integration of the transgene remain to be satisfactorily resolved.
Stage 3: Modification of all adult cells in a particular tissue--very hard, and probably far in the future as far as arbitrary tissues are concerned, although some specific cell types may become accessible in a nearer time frame.
Sounds great. Now I'll just need TiVo to upgrade their cable box control software, so that if one show I want to record is in conflict with another, or if I forget to tell it to record a show, it will automatically reschedule that show for recording at a time when the TiVo is free.
Actually changes in the number of digits occur pretty readily. So chances are, if 8 toes were better than 10, we'd have 8. That doesn't necessarily mean 10 is better than 8, though (although I don't believe that the little toe is useless). After all, it has to be some number. It is a pretty safe assumption that all of the simple changes have been tried, if not in humans then in our pre-human ancestors. Evolution is indeed far from perfect, but one thing that it does do very well is find a local optimum. Which is to say that any small/easy change decreases fitness (or at best is neutral). That means all of the single nucleotide changes, as well as changes in the levels of expression of genes. So to tweak ourselves better than evolution, we're going to have to make large changes. We might find a protein in some phylogenetically distant species that works better than one of ours, but trying to make small tweaks to our own equipment will almost certainly do more harm than good.
It's not that simple. It's hard to introduce a gene into every cel in a tissuel, unless you do it in the germ line or zygote. Some gain-of-function modifications can be made without having to transfect every cell. 10% of your cells overexpressing a growth factor might well be enough to produce an alteration. But the same level of technology would not be adequate to reverse it, because you'd only replace the defective gene in 1% of the cells that have it. And of course, if the side effect is cancer (something we're already beginning to see with gene therapy), you'd be trying to remove the gene from a rapidly dividing cell population that is prone to evolve resistance to whatever gene inactivation method you try.
Of course it can do a better job. Just look at the front section of Science magazine for an example of responsible, generally accurate, scientific jounalism. But it is not easy to find people who both have a broad understanding of science and who can write. It requires a real reporter, in other words, not somebody whose primary skills lie in rearranging the words in press releases.